About twenty years ago, Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, gave birth to a very wild idea - to sell machines that process information for home use. Things went well, and the founders made a lot of money and got the fame they deserved by being desperate dreamers. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came across an idea more bizarre and more fantastic: selling computer operating systems. It was much more new than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. The computer at least had a real capacity. It fit in a box that you could open, turn on, and watch light bulbs flash. The operating system had no tangible embodiment at all. It was on the disk, of course, but the disk was never anything more than a box in which the OS came to the consumer. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeros, which, properly set and configured, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeros. Even those few , Who really understood CM? What is Computer Operating System (CM)? They thought about it ,. As a fantastically clever miracle of engineering thought , Like a reactor or a U-2 spy plane. It is not something ,. what could ever be (in high-tech language) "sold". Right now, the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like this. as Gillette trades razor blades. New versions of operating systems are released as if they were Hollywood blockbusters: for celebrity performances, in the atmosphere of talk shows and world tours. The market for them is wide enough that people worry if it is not monopolized by one company. Even the least tech-savvy in our society now have at least a vague idea of what operating systems are for; moreover, they have valid opinions about their comparative merits. In general, it’s clear, even to technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have software that works in your Macintosh and you move it to a Windows machine, it won’t work. That it would be, in fact, a ridiculous and idiotic venture, like nailing horseshoes to Buick tires. A man who fell into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and who is now awake, could have bought the morning New York Times and figured it out... Well, almost. The first : The richest man in the world made his fortune on what? Railways? Sea freight? Oil? No, operating systems. Point two: The Department of Justice has seized Microsoft in connection with the alleged monopoly in the Op. market Systems with legitimate means that were introduced to hold the power of nineteenth-century robber barons. Point three: my friend recently informed me that she had stopped (so far) intensive e-mail correspondence with her young man. At first he seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started transferring all the PCversaMac fights to me. "What the hell is going on here? And does the business of operating systems have a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is completely subjective ; but, since I honestly spent time not only using, but programming Macintoshes, Windowsmachines, Linuxboxes and BeOS, perhaps it is not so ignorant an essay as to be completely useless. This is a subjective essay, more of a review than a research article, and so may look dishonest or biased, compared to technical reviews you can dig up in PC. journals. But ever since Macs came along, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and all metaphors here are as fair a game as I care.